


Self Control

by Juniper200



Series: Selves [1]
Category: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Genre: Character Study, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-04
Updated: 2013-09-04
Packaged: 2017-12-25 13:52:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/953868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Juniper200/pseuds/Juniper200
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She knows no one lets go entirely, even in sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Self Control

There are nights when she relishes the closeness, when she rests her head on the biceps of Will’s outflung arm and falls back into Jack, who curls around her as though his flesh were clay being used by a goldsmith to make a mold of her body. On nights like those, she lets her mind roam along her skin, and she feels every point of contact, every inch of herself as if for the first time. And when she grows too weary to thrill in the electric sensation of being touched and touching back, she calls her mind back and uses her body like a link to match Jack’s breath to Will’s and lets their warmth and rhythm lull her to sleep.

Other nights – nights like this one – her mind doesn’t fit her body and her skin itches from the inside and she can’t bear to be held a moment longer. She lies stiffly between them, feeling like a lead soldier between two rag dolls. When she senses their sleep is deep enough to continue without her presence, she slowly extricates herself and jitters about the cabin.

Sometimes she paces. Other times she throws herself into a book, hoping she’ll lose herself and, when she finds her way back, her mind and body will have reconciled and allow her to sleep. Once in a while, she goes on deck and lets her thoughts compete with the waves. But men on the night watch are lonely, so she goes topside only rarely for fear she might have to try to speak.

Tonight, she keeps a night watch of her own, scrutinizing her men from a cross-legged perch atop the chest at the foot of the bed.

Although she’d thought her husband a rag doll compared to her unyielding body, she sees sleep hasn’t truly relaxed him. Will’s brow is furrowed, and even at this distance she can hear the grinding of his teeth. She imagines a nightmare for him, though he’s always told her he seldom dreams. She believes him; he hasn’t lied to her for years.

He sighs and rolls onto his stomach. He sleeps with his arms drawn up high, keeping his hands on the pillow as if to ward off blows aimed at his face. She can see that the muscles of his shoulders and neck are still pulled tight from a day spent half on ironmongery and half on sailing. It goes unnoticed by those who only see him dressed, but she and Jack know that Will’s body is lopsided, his right side more heavily muscled than the left, a consequence of having dedicated his life to the hammer and the sword.

He hasn’t noticed yet – and after all this time she knows he never will – but she’s always focused caresses and kisses on the left side of him. She half-believes that lavishing attention on the weaker side of his body will somehow bring the other side of his personality to the fore, the side that’s able to relax his iron control of his speech, his movements, his thoughts.

Will hates that side of himself, with its outbursts and rash actions, for all that it is what sent him careening off after his wife when she faced her greatest danger. But she feels such fondness for him when he makes a rash statement that turns his ears pink after he's realized what he said and when she sees his hips buck involuntarily as Jack does something prodigious clever between the sheets.

Jack and his active imagination are nearly always clever between the sheets, but tonight he’s kicked them away and the length of his body is exposed to the darkness. He’s sleeping in his breeches, though they’re undone at the waist and she can see the beginning of his dark trail of hair. He still wears the scarf that holds his hair out of harms way and the twist of fabric and leather around his palm and wrist that could serve any function or none at all while they’re out at sea, as it’s not in his interest to pick the pockets of those aboard the Black Pearl.

He slowly scratches at a healing scrape on his shoulder. Does his dream transform the itch into the sting of the lash, she wonders. Perhaps it’s been transmuted to the whisper of Will’s touch. As she surveys the map of scars and burns and tattoos and inexplicable smooth patches on his chest, she realizes that, although Jack has offered up every part of himself for inspection – and no part he has bared has come up lacking in her eyes – he has never offered them up all at once. What she’s learned of his body, she learned in stages.

She is of two minds on the subject: It could be that even the tedium of undressing every night is too much for him, and his attention flits away to something else – her shoulder, Will’s thigh, the green flash on the horizon as the sun sets outside the window – and never returns to finish the job.

It’s an amusing theory, and one that fits with the personality Jack embraces. She thinks it more likely, though, that he can’t bear to part with all of his armor, even in haven of his companions’ arms. Is he still the legend he’s cultivated without the legend’s trappings? She won’t ask it of him, and as long as they both live, she won’t make him ask it of himself. She knows he lets them share his bed because their bond is strong enough that unacknowledged questions have little effect on its strength. They all tacitly agree the past and the repressed are best left where they are.

It does not surprise her that, even in sleep, they maintain their self control, Will with his unrelenting body and Jack with his gaudy shell. She wonders if either has ever watched her sleep in this way and if her sleeping self continues to play things close to the vest like theirs do.

The night grows deeper, and the bells for the change of watch tear her from her reverie. She marks the heavy tread of a man stumbling away from the helm towards his hammock and realizes that her control has returned; her mind is nestled snug within her body and threatens to rattle no more tonight.

She slides from the chest and slithers back into the empty space in the center of the bed that Jack and Will have left empty throughout the long hours of her watch. Without waking, Jack cleaves to her back, just as Will turns in his sleep to rest his arm across her waist.


End file.
